Dispossession

by Chaz Brenchley

  “He warned you, you said,” and she twisted round in her seat, the better to stare my mother down. If anyone could, I thought, Suzie could; but I didn’t really believe it even of her, I didn’t expect to see it now. “So what did he say, exactly? How much did he tell you?”

  “Oh, he told me enough, dear. He said that these people could be after me, probably were; and he said they were killers and I couldn’t possibly fight them, so I should run and hide somewhere they wouldn’t think to look. And if I ever saw a van or a uniform with Scimitar or SUSI on the side, that was them and they’d found me. They might come in plain clothes, he said, so I shouldn’t trust any strangers, just in case; but if they came in uniform, I could be absolutely rock-solid sure.”

  “Okay. Okay,” Suzie kicking hard, rising brilliantly through the clouds and not saying a word, not saying no one warned Jacky, how come you got lucky and he didn’t, why didn’t someone, Jonty, anyone warn my poor bloody brother? “Why, though? You must have asked him why.”

  “Because of Lindsey,” she said. “Because whatever it was that man was mixed up in that had made him run, they thought I was mixed up in it too.”

  And she shrugged, can you believe that?, at the ignorance of these people; and I almost smiled at the gesture, so very much my mother. Of course she wasn’t mixed up in someone else’s twisted manipulations, she had far too good a sense of self-preservation. Besides, she’d doubtless have been too deeply tangled in her own, much too busy to bother.

  Suzie was nodding, following the logic, not knowing my mother well enough to see that there was no logic there. I thought probably her next question would be tangential, so why were you hanging out with that man? or something like it. So I interrupted in the moment of her silence, earning myself a glare that I could feel, although I wasn’t even looking in her direction.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “that makes no sense at all.”

  Only to us, my mother’s smug smile said; and again Suzie drew breath to speak, probably to disagree with me; and again I snatched the moment for myself, before their misunderstandings dragged us away from what I wanted to say, from what seemed to me imperative and urgent.

  “Lindsey Nolan was defrauding a charity,” I said, “to coin himself a bit of petty cash. What’s a security firm’s interest in that? I doubt they were making donations, and they certainly wouldn’t be employed to protect the charity’s funds. Why would they be the least bit concerned? Let alone threatening to murder his girlfriend, after he’d skipped the country?”

  Suzie grunted, seemed reluctantly to concede that as a fair point, and glanced at my mother for an explanation.

  And got another of those patented shrugs, and “How should I know?” said my elegant, eloquent parent.

  “Didn’t you ask?” demanded my wife, disbelieving. “I mean, Jonty must have known something, or he wouldn’t have known to warn you...”

  “Of course I asked. But does he trust his mother, with information vital to her health and wellbeing? He does not.”

  o0o

  Meeting a brick wall there, Suzie tried the other tack, the what-were-you-doing-hanging-out-with-Nolan-anyway line of enquiry; and this time, as I could have forewarned her, the wall wasn’t brick but breezeblock. This time it wasn’t that my mother didn’t know the answers, only that she was under no circumstances going to divulge them. Suzie battered, she had persistence on her side if nothing else; but my mother had a long life’s-worth of acquired skill in guile and evasion, and no slip of a girl was going to break that down.

  At last Suzie seemed not to accept defeat, not that, but simply to recognise that if she was going to carry on banging her irresistible head against my mother’s liquid, changeable immovability—which certainly she was—then there must be more comfortable places and ways to do it than twisted around in a Mini. So she turned to face forward, with a cold glower at me en passant, set the car in motion and took us slowly back towards the flat.

  I don’t know if she was looking in her mirror more often than usual, perhaps to watch her brother’s dream or else this first faint hint of his enemy retreating and retreating at our rear; but after a couple of minutes she was surely looking in her mirror more often than even a paranoid learner would, and then she started taking wrong turnings, taking us away from the flat and towards nowhere in particular, so far as I could tell.

  Easy enough to guess what was happening, but I asked anyway.

  “What’s up, Suzie?”

  “We’re being followed. Big black limo, see it? Couple back?”

  My turn to twist in my seat; and yes, I saw it. Classic baddie transport, blacked-out windows and all.

  But then, our windows were blacked out also; let’s not jump to conclusions, folks. Family.

  I said that, or some part of it. Took it on faith that she was right, that they were following; but, “Let’s not jump to conclusions, they may not be malign.”

  “Oh, what? Do me a favour! My brother’s dead, your mum’s been living in hiding, someone tried to explode you with a burning truck; and now someone’s trailing us and giving off very bad vibes indeed, and you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, do you, Jonty?”

  Actually, right then I wanted to hug her: just one of those impulses you get sometimes. But she was driving fast round some tight corners in traffic, and it didn’t seem the moment. Besides, she was right. Jumping to a conclusion here was the only safe, the only sensible thing to do.

  And that only the first jump in what could prove to be a triple or a whole series. The next, I thought, was obvious; time to leap without looking. “I’ll jump out,” I said. “At the lights,” added quickly, not to let them think I thought myself a hero, to fall and roll in the road at speed.

  “The fuck you will,” Suzie snarled. “Fucking hero,” and all my good work gone to waste. “Who says they’re after you, anyway?”

  “Only one way to find out. And I’m not being a hero. Forget the movies; anyone on foot in a city can get away from a car. It’s easy.”

  “Suppose they get out of the car?”

  “Then I’ll grab hold of the nearest policeman and cry sanctuary. That’s what you do, too; if they keep coming after you, just drive to the police station. Promise?”

  “Why don’t we all drive there, right now?”

  “Because we’re too much in the dark here,” though I was improvising this, I hadn’t thought it out in the slightest. Maybe I did have a touch of the hero in me after all; unless it was only adrenalin pumping through my system, fight or flee and going tamely to the police not on the list there, not a biological option. Or else it was the biological male in me, wanting to protect my womenfolk. All sorts of reasons there seemed to be, if not the one I told her. “If we split up, they have to do one thing or the other, come after you or come after me; and at least that tells us something.”

  She didn’t look convinced, but I wasn’t offering her a veto on this one and the gods were against her anyway, there were traffic lights just ahead turning red with a lovely sense of timing.

  “See you back at the flat, okay? And if it’s you they want, don’t be stupid, right?”

  “Tell it to yourself,” she muttered, “don’t tell it to me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. See you. ’Bye, Mum...” And altogether heroically I stepped out into the road as soon as Suzie had nosed reluctantly to a stop, slammed the door behind me and was off, picking a way through the traffic and then sprinting across a car park, my mind already plotting a route that was all footpaths and alleys, no chance for a car to track me.

  Far end of the car park and halfway up a grassy bank, I looked behind, quick as a flick; and yes, there was someone coming after. Had the car stopped or gone on, had they divided as we had divided, were there enough of them to do that, had I gained no advantage at all for myself or my family?

  Couldn’t tell, couldn’t see, didn’t have time. Whoever was chasing me was coming fast. Fit and hard he looked, what brief time I had him in my eyeline. So I
jerked my head to the front again, and ran.

  Up and down the grassy slopes, in and out the alleys: I ran and he followed, and at last, unintentionally, here we were in Chinatown, or lurking just behind it. Slippery cobbles and the smell of rotting cabbage, no sunlight; the old city wall on the one side and the backs of restaurants on the other, above them the backs of clubs and other businesses; and above one of them was the flat. I was more or less leading him straight to my mother, straight to Suzie, handing over hostages with a fixed and stupid smile.

  Perhaps I’d have stopped then, regardless; perhaps I’d have gone with him to any fate he chose, only to keep them safe. I didn’t need to choose, though, because it was him who stopped, just long enough to bellow at me.

  “Jonty! For Christ’s sake, mate...”

  At that—and with the comfort of distance, I was still keeping thirty or forty metres ahead—I looked back, saw him not running and let myself not run any longer. Stood gasping, shaking, hugely overdrawn on oxygen; and now that I was looking, not seeing only an enemy chasing, I could see who that enemy was.

  Hard to think of him as an enemy, when I’d only met him the once and that time he’d saved my life.

  So I stood still, not going even halfway to meet him as he came but not running now. How possibly, how the hell could I run?

  Besides, fit and hard he undoubtedly was, and I wasn’t. He’d have caught me, soon or sooner. Better to give myself over now, try not to make it look too much like defeat or surrender.

  “Dean. Hi...”

  “What the fuck are you running for?” Bastard wasn’t even breathing hard. “What’ve you done? Apart from pissing Vernon off?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing, as far as I know,” though that of course was not far, not far at all. I could have done murder and not known it. “Only someone’s after us, and...” And running away had seemed like a pretty good idea, at the time. Now, of course, I felt nothing but stupid, cowardly, ridiculous.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. “Vernon’s after you.”

  I shook my head. “Someone else.” Someone worse. “Whoever sent that truck through the hospital wall, most likely. Unless it was you broke into my hotel room last night, and then came round the flat and tried there?”

  “Not me. No one else of Vernon’s, either. I’d know. Do you want protection?”

  Yes, I did want protection; but not, I thought, from Vernon. Last time, it had come in a uniform with Scimitar on the shoulder-flashes. In retrospect, that didn’t make me feel any too protected.

  So a quick change of subject, nice and clear: “How are your arms?” I asked, remembering that he’d been burned badly enough to be kept in hospital overnight.

  “My arms are fine,” he said, “all new and shiny, pink as a baby’s arse. Do you want protection?”

  Bastard. No, I said, thanks very much all the same; and he said, “Well, see what Vernon thinks.”

  “No, Dean. It’s my choice, not his.” My life, and I was only just starting to get a grip, and that only on a couple of corners. I wouldn’t willingly cede any fraction of that little control to someone else.

  “Maybe. Okay,” lifting his hands in mock surrender as I glared at him, “I won’t ask him. I swear. But if you change your mind, just say. We can fix you up. Not a problem.”

  And then one of those strong hands—and yes, there was new smooth pink skin across his knuckles, clearly to be seen now that I was looking—reached out to grip my elbow, light and easy as a loose noose, and he said, “Come on, then, Jonty. You’re invited for lunch. We’ll have to run for the bus now, you’ve lost us a lift and believe me, you don’t want us to be late.”

  o0o

  And I went, of course, how not? Still painfully aware how close we were to Suzie and my mother, I’d have gone anywhere, I think, with anyone. Going off for lunch with Dean seemed like a pretty good option, in the circumstances. Even with Vernon Deverill for host.

  Dean had been joking, it seemed, about running for the bus. No trouble for him, but now that I’d stopped I couldn’t have run anywhere to save my life or my mother’s. Or my wife’s, come to that.

  He’d been joking altogether about the bus, as it turned out. We walked slow and steady to the wall’s end, and if he kept his hand under my elbow all the way no doubt it was only there as a support, he’d seen how blown I was; and there was the bus station, right enough, but there was a taxi-rank also and we took a cab.

  o0o

  Deverill lived out of town, and no surprise there, I’d expected nothing else. A drive of four or five miles brought us to a pair of wrought-iron gates, watched over by a closed-circuit camera on a vandalproof pylon. Contrary to orthodoxy, form doesn’t have to follow function; the gates at least were beautiful.

  Clever, too. At a word from Dean the taxi-driver just drove straight at them, and they swung silently open for us, while the camera turned its head to watch.

  Deverill’s driveway added maybe another mile to the journey, winding narrowly through mature woods and then running straight across sheep-pastures—lush and level as a lawn, these, so different from the sheep-scattered hills of yesterday, not Luke country at all—and a mediaeval bridge so narrow that pedestrians had needed passing-places even when they built it, little niches of shelter in the stone.

  And then, at last, there was the house.

  A big square Georgian statement, we’ve got money, a couple of centuries later it should have been National Trust, it had that look about it. That it wasn’t, that it was still a private house in the ’90s only renewed and underscored that original statement. Some of us have still got money, and we’re quite willing to flaunt it, that house said to me today.

  Just a couple of cars parked in the forecourt, one the same darkened limo that had trailed us through town, the other a Jag in vibrant red. Some other guest for lunch, perhaps? Or Vernon’s private car, for when he didn’t want to travel in chauffeured splendour?

  Whichever, it didn’t matter. If another guest, then our difference in status became all too apparent, all too quickly. Dean directed the taxi around to the back of the house, through a stone arch into what must have been the stable yard, what was now clearly parking for staff. A dozen cars here, none of them quite new and none of them at all grand; and once he’d paid off the taxi, even Dean had to sound a buzzer to get us in through the reinforced door, for all that the cameras had watched our arrival and knew exactly who we were.

  This part of the house had been altered past any recognition, almost past bearing. Narrow corridors and small offices, computers everywhere, strip lighting and fire doors and not a glimpse, not the least ghost of how it used to be. Cruelty to eloquent buildings, this was. Deverill clearly believed in bringing his work home with him. But Dean hustled me along with no more than a nod to any of the people we passed, and he took me through one last heavy door and into an utterly different world.

  Here was the hallway, rising three storeys above us; and there ahead was the front door, a massive job in oak and iron and another reminder of my comparative rank here. We’d driven all around the house and walked back through it, only because I didn’t have clout enough to rate the front door. Or Dean didn’t think that I did.

  Marble columns in the hall here, original floorboards worn and warped with age, glowing dark with polish. Dean marched me across them, tapped at a closed door half again as high and twice as wide as standard, and pushed it open without waiting for a reply.

  His head gestured me through first. I walked in obediently and was vaguely conscious of his closing the door again behind us and then staying there, standing probably with his back to it and his legs no doubt apart and his arms I imagined folded like any cheap cliché of a watchful guard in a situation of uncertainty, not knowing whether his companion is prisoner or guest. He’d saved my life, I thought, and taken burns himself to do it, because it was his job to do that, at that time. Things had changed somewhat, and might change more. If they changed enough, I thought, Dean might take my life
with no more hesitation.

  Ach, don’t be morbid, Jonty Marks. Get a grip, will you? He’s not Mafia, even if he likes to pretend he is. And whatever reason could he have to want to kill you, or Deverill to want you dead?

  More questions, real or not, and I had no answers to those either. Fine. Let them go, worry when you need to.

  Right now I had enough to worry about, in the way Vernon Deverill was looking but not striding across this wide room to greet me, very much not holding his hand out to a luncheon-guest in welcome.

  The room had Regency paper on the walls, that might even have been original; it had watercolours and oils that certainly were. I rather thought the furniture was also, or some of it. A table and a sideboard particularly might have been made two hundred years ago to stand just there, and not have been moved since.

  The leather-covered chairs around the fireplace were not so old, though old enough for sure, cracked and worn and comfortable-looking. One of them held a woman in her fifties, who held a glass in her hand and gazed at me across the top of it, assessing, quite unforthcoming.

  If that was a habit, it was catching. Deverill’s one hand also held a glass, while his other fiddled in his jacket pocket; and his face was as revealing as the windows of his limo as he gazed at me all down the length of a sizeable Bokhara rug, and said, “I don’t think you were entirely straight with me, son, last time we spoke.”

  “Be fair, Mr Deverill,” I said, respectful but not presumptuous, not “Vernon” now. “Would you have been? In the circumstances?”

  “What circumstances are those, then?”

  Sometimes, with some people, bullets are very much for biting. “I was sore, I was scared, I was very confused; and in my business, in this region, you’re pretty much public enemy number one, Mr Deverill. What am I supposed to do, suddenly open my heart to someone whose agenda I can’t understand, whose motives I have every reason to distrust?”

  “A man in that position,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, not at all challenging my definition of his own, “I’d have said you’d be glad to trust someone.”